Barr wrote compact yet lucid historical surveys of three major periods of western history. Two of his books, The Will of Zeus and The Mask of Jove deal with the Greeks and Romans, respectively. He also wrote The Pilgrimage of Western Man, dealing with western history from the Renaissance through the early post-World War II era.[2]

In a 1951 New York Post column, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. mocked Barr as belonging to the "solve-the-Russian-problem-by-giving-them-money school," and said, of him and two others, "None of these gentlemen is a Communist, but none of them objects very much to Communism. They are the Typhoid Marys of the left, bearing the germs of the infection even if not suffering obviously from the disease."[2]

Barr's views on the poor quality of American education and an American society driven by consumerist ideology are presented in ironic terms in Purely Academic (1958), a classic academic novel set in an anonymous Corn Belt university during the McCarthy period, as when a character in the story says that

Many observers here and abroad note a kind of higher illiteracy in our college graduates. But we like it that way. In our cars we like horsepower; in our studies we like slow-motion and low-gear. In education the intellectually second-rate does not shock us. To insist on the first-rate would be arrogant. Anyhow, if we are so second-rate, how come we are the richest nation in recorded history and the fattest people on earth? [3]

^Barr, Stringfellow. The Pilgrimage of Western Man. Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1974. Originally published in 1962 by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, New York as KB-45 of Keystone Books. Originally copyrighted in 1949 by Stringfellow Barr. This title is currently (2012) out of print.